Wild Act 1
Posted: March 17, 2009 Filed under: Wild Act 14 Comments »I picked this up for a dollar. I heard a bunch of people raving about it on a message board years ago when it ended, and I always kind of wanted to try it. Let’s see how successful I am at skimming it out of the used comic bins.
It’s hard for me to believe this only dates back to 1998. Shoujo art has changed so much since then! I would have guessed it was early to mid 90s, actually. The sad thing is that this looks dated, and I was actually into manga when it was first coming out in Japan. I don’t like to think enough time has passed since then that something can look dated.
Anyway. I was surprised at how much I liked the story. This is yet another shoujo series about acting, except, refreshingly, the heroine isn’t all that interested in being an actress despite being the daughter of a famous actress, being raised by a notable acting group, and being the object of desire for the hottest young actor around. No, she’s really more into an actor who died before she was born. So into him, in fact, that she goes around stealing his former possessions from people, which may or may not involve tiny pocket robots and beating up various perverts.
I was kind of surprised how quickly the relationship developed between the main couple. They both seem to be into each other, and it’s mutually understood by the end of the volume, so I’m kind of wondering where else that’s going. It’s still got a step or two before they officially become a couple, but they get over some drama pretty quickly and I can’t imagine it will take that long for them to be “official.” Of course, it will be nice to read a series where the main couple stays together for the duration, because those are kind of rare. And admittedly, as of the first volume, the romance is the least interesting thing about this series. It’s a great romance, but the plot is just inherently weird and more awesome. I mean… she breaks in and steals stuff that belonged to a movie actor that died 15 years ago. That’s really good enough for me.
Plus, bonus points for the pet flying squirrel. My friend has one that she carries around in a little pouch around her neck wherever she goes. It is literally the cutest thing I have ever seen. I like to imagine Yukino here doing the same thing with Kamui.
So yeah. A search is in order for the rest of this, I think.
[...] Disciple on vol. 1 of Trinity Blood: Rage Against the Moon (Tiamat’s Manga Reviews) Connie on vol. 1 of Wild Act (Slightly Biased [...]
I really enjoyed Happy Hustle High. I’m sure I would like this at least as much.
Personally, I don’t like contemporary manga art very much. The best artists make it look good (the best artists always do that). However, I cannot wait for some new style to evolve to make the current style look dated. And then all of the people who insist that newer manga = better artwork will realize how awful the current art style is (well, I hope they will, I realize my opinion is extremely subjective).
My favorite style? I fall for the early 90s’ style. It demands the least talent from the artist to please me. 70s’ comes in second place.
Oh, I didn’t realize Happy Hustle High was by the same artist. I knew she did Punch, but that one sounded mediocre compared to Wild Act. I did read Gaba Kawa several months ago, but that one feels like its for younger girls, and I didn’t like it that much.
A lot of contemporary shoujo art is pretty simple, like elements from formerly ornate artwork from 30 or so years ago were stripped away again and again until we are left with the modern form (not to say there isn’t still some nice-looking and detailed series). My brain just fills in a natural progression where we are eventually left with a blank page and forced to use our imagination. But this series definitely made me want to break out some of my flavor of the moment-type series from around 2000 and compare the artwork to, say, Otomen.
Unfortunately, I imagine that a lot of the people that favor the newer artwork and don’t read older series for aesthetic reasons won’t be around in ten years, in terms of them still reading manga. I keep hoping more and more of the teens that get hooked on manga will hang on through college though, because that means a bigger fanbase for older series.
I do love 70s art (I’m a big fan of curly hair in all its forms in terms of drawn artwork), but I think runner up is late 80s for me, like in Cipher and Moon Child. There’s a moodiness to it (or at least in what I’ve read, which isn’t very much) that I like a lot, though some of that carries over into the 90s.
I was tempted to say that 70s was my favorite artistic period, but I realized I was thinking of the best artists. When it comes to second-tier artists, I prefer the early 90s over the 70s (only in linework – I lap up even second-rate 70s melodrama). Though most of my reading is shojo, I am also including shonen art. I actually like contemporary shonen art more than contemporary shojo, and that’s not true for any other era.
I like curves more than angles, though the best artists can make me like angles.
I have a pretty good idea what the material world looks like, so I am more interested in how the artist draws the human mind/soul. 70s and early 90s were both times when it was really popular to just draw straight from the characters’ hearts, and use tons of visual metaphors. And I love the non-standard layouts.
I would actually argue that contemporary art has a lot of fullness. However, I already know the laws of physics, and I want to see something else in manga. I feel that using so much fullness limits the art from doing other, wilder things.
I hadn’t considered shonen art. I think it would be a split between 80s and present shounen styles for me. I enjoy a lot of the art from the over-the-top action series from the 80s (Fist of the North Star, Saint Seiya, Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure, Offered). The two shounen series I think of off the top of my head with my favorite art, Berserk and Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure, both started in the late 80s. I like a lot of detail, and it seems like a lot of shounen artwork in series that aren’t cash-ins from the past decade seems to be trending in that direction, where I would say a lot of 90s series were a bit more plain. The same with seinen manga, though I haven’t read nearly enough of that to judge the differences between the decades.
I tend to favor soft edges myself. I usually stay away from series with a sort of machine aesthetic to them. There’s an entire genre of these in seinen manga, but it might also be one of the reasons I stay away from a lot of sci-fi series.
It’s a shame that the panel layouts in shoujo have sort of standardized. The ones with the best composition were and still are a cut above regular series and are generally more “arty,” but you don’t see a lot of series in, say, Hana to Yume or Lala experimenting with it at all anymore. Or, at least, among the ones that are coming out here. Shounen series are still good for it in a lot of cases though, simply because fight scenes are really, really horrible unless you get creative with panel layouts. I suppose they aren’t necessary in dialogue-driven shoujo, but it’s as you say, a lot of contemporary shoujo seem to lack a flair for visual metaphors and illustrating emotional states outside of isolation or a facial expression. I’m sure that the traditions of the 70s and 80s aren’t followed because the amount of line and tone zinging through the background in key moments is sort of cheesy today, but they are wonderful for visually conveying emotion.
I can sort of have sympathy for the cheese factor after having just read a volume of Saint Seiya this week, though. That series goes over the top and through the roof in terms of visually conveying the extreme emotions of the characters, to the point where you have to wonder if it was taken seriously even when it was coming out. It does it with a totally straight face though, which is part of its charm.
I’ve only read two shonen from the 70s (Drifting Classroom and Barefoot Gen), but I love the linework in both. I don’t call it pretty, but there is something raw about them both that I really like.
The way creative layouts and explosively metaphorical art is viewed very differently depending on the era. I read somewhere that when Glass Mask was first published, it drew a lot of criticism for being so conservative and old-fashioned. And while I haven’t read any pre-70s shojo, I can see how Glass Mask is not as revolutionary as Year 24 stuff, especially the linework. However, the writing is so good that even if it was told entirely in stick figures I think I would still cry.
I actually also like realism in sequential art … but the contemporary shojo artists use enough artistic cliches (big eyes for example) that it doesn’t ring as realism with me either. Of course, this may me cultural centralism on my part. I am much more likely to say that American comic book art is realistically drawn than manga (with a lot of exceptions of course), but I don’t know that a non-American would agree.
And Colleen Doran is the only artist I can think of whose comic book art (to me) both reads as realism and fantastical at the same time. Again, she’s American, so it could just be my cultural bias.
Hm, unfortunately, WordPress seems to have eaten my original comment, so let me say a few things in brief and expand on them tomorrow.
With or without a cultural bias, It’s probably safe to say that most manga art doesn’t tend towards realism. Though I always hate this generalization because it’s way over-simplified, a lot of credit is given to Osamu Tezuka for creating a lot of the modern manga genres, and his style is not a realistic one. It is easy to see the influence his art had on a lot of artists in the 60s, though, both shoujo and shounen. In turn, his art is heavily, heavily influenced by American newspaper comics and animation from the early part of the 20th century. If I’m not mistaken (and I very well could be), aside from the influences of newspaper comics, I think American comic book art developed around pulp novels and radio dramas from the 30s, so they tended towards a more realistic style to match the tone of those stories.
I think gekiga is one of the movements that kept some realism in certain genres of manga (or, rather, made it possible to have manga series for adults alone that featured more serious stories with realistic art). I’m never quite sure what fits the definition of gekiga outside the work of Yoshihiro Tatsumi, but I’m pretty sure a lot of the action comics and seinen historical epics from the late 60s and through the 70s owe some debt to gekiga. Yoshihiro Tatsumi is usually considered the master of the genre, and his style is still a little cartoony, though I always mentally compare it to Will Eisner while I’m reading his stuff. There may have been some more serious stuff before gekiga, but I think post-war censorship made historical stories a bit ridiculous, and I think gekiga was mostly an underground movement that went around some of the accepted manga standards like that.
And I had a few comments about Masakazu Katsura (who has surprisingly realistic and detailed art for series that are filling the romantic comedy T&A slot in Shounen Jump) and my roommate’s Conan comics, but let me leave that for now.
My brain thinks like a 70s shojo melodrama. I know, because the stories I used to make up for myself bear a strong resemblance plotwise to 70s shojo plots. And that was before I knew anything about 70s shojo. When I first discovered 70s shojo manga, well…
I looked through Bara no Tameni, an early 90s shojo/josei (I have a few bunko volumes, and no, I don’t know much about the plot), and I realize what makes me like early 90s linework more than 70s linework. Bara no Tameni has a pretty tame page layout, and it doesn’t use sparkles or expressionistic effects, but I still like the art. And I realized that it doesn’t have curly, or straight, but *wavy* lines. And that’s what I like. I like wavy more than curly, and curly more than straight. 70s was a curly era; early 90s was a wavy era.
Hmm, now you make me want to drag out some volumes to compare. I know what you mean by curly versus straight, but I’d never noticed the wavy lines before. It does make sense as a stage between the two, though. Hmm. Sailor Moon and Fushigi Yugi are the two series I have with what I imagine as an early 90s look, so I’ll have to look at them more closely now, especially since I haven’t touched either of them in years. Sailor Moon I recall having art that looked slightly older than early 90s, whereas I was shocked to learn Fushigi Yugi was older, because the art did seem pretty contemporary in the very late 90s when I was reading it. I have to say, I’m definitely curious to see the art style in Itazura na Kiss when it starts coming out in English too, because I believe it was one of the classics of the 90s high school romance.
Some other early 90s titles I think of are Hana Yori Dango, Dolls (by Yumiko Kawahara), and the later volumes of Please Save My Earth (which, understandably, have much better artwork than the 80s volumes).
I also probably forgive Bara no Tameni for not having the flourishes (creative page layout, etc) because it’s drawn in a more realistic style than most manga. The eyes have normal proportions, for starters. Still, I would probably like the linework even more if it had the flourishes …
To some extent, late 80s and early 90s flow together, so I think we are talking about the same era. I happen to prefer the 90s end.
Mind you, the sight of a 70s shojo cover fills me with more glee than any other, all other things being equal. But part of that is just anticipation of the story – with the second-tier artists, the curls do get to me after a while.
I did remember Hana Yori Dango started coming out in the early 90s, but from what I recall seeing, its style seemed a little plainer than the types I’m thinking of. I might be thinking of the end of the series though, which probably has a bit more of a contemporary look, since that’s the only part I’ve read. I know Domyouji had more of a perm in the earlier parts of the series.
I didn’t realize Dolls was so old. I actually thought it was kind of a lesser version of the Mitsukazu Mihara series of the same name, but that could just be because they came out at the same time here in the US. Since they were both about living dolls, I gave the Kawahara series a pass. Maybe I’ll give it a try since it’s older and short.
I kind of like the big curls. I haven’t read very much of the run-of-the-mill 70s shoujo series, so the novelty probably just hasn’t worn out for me, but I get a kick out of that big hair. I wish that was something that happened in modern series.
Well, I’ve only read the first half of Hana Yori Dango, so I know the more 90s portion of it.
Dolls (Yumiko Kawahara) is my favorite manga short story collection. I didn’t like the stories at first, and only kept reading because the linework is *exactly* what I love. Then there were some stories I really loved. And the last story … well, imagine if your purpose in life were to experience beautiful, bittersweet melancholy so that the rarest and most gorgeous flower in the world would blossom from your body. And then kill you. If that kind of thing happens in Mihara’s ‘Doll’, then I need to read that one too.
I haven’t read that much second-tier 70s shojo myself, but I’ve seen scans.
Cool. I might have to see about tracking that one down. I’ve heard literally no discussion about it over the years, but I don’t mind short story collections at all.
Mihara’s stories are a little bit dark. I didn’t like them when I read them because they seemed to me like they were taking themselves too seriously for how over-the-top sad and ridiculous all the stories were, but the actual plot of the series that popped up occasionally in the stories and wrapped up in the last volume sort of took me by surprise and was quite good about resolving all the dark themes and whatnot.
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